Nobody Cares if You Don’t Like Microservices

It’s 2016. You may find lots of online blogs/tweets/etc with variants like this:

Microservices suck

Monolithic or vertical stack is better because …

Microservices are impractical

Microservices suffer from …. or …

etc

These are all valid points. Here’s one more point, equally valid:

Nobody cares what you think about microservices, even though you are correct in your negative observations.

Fact Number 1 about Microservices:

Microservices is going to happen. There will be problems.

http://www.reactivemanifesto.org/

The reason microservices is going to happen is because the vertical stack doesn’t work, and probably can’t work, under the load that is becoming de rigueur in current enterprises.

“Deal with it,” as my (then) teenage kids used to scold me.

Fact Number 2 about Microservices:

There’s a bigger problem with microservices that not many people are talking about. Almost nobody. And for good reason.

There is a very good chance that your skills are not up to snuff for microservices. Whew. I said it. Now, we are all looking at the real elephant in the living room.

Hard stuff. Like scaling and elasticity, especially when so many of the toolsets are immature and underdeveloped. Messaging and APIs. Standards that are not even fully formed. There’s a lot to be deficient in. I’m scrambling, and you probably are too.

20 years from now, asynchronous message based APIs that are instantaneous and easily linked will be easy for all of us. Right now it’s a skillset that few of us have, except within very narrow technology parameters. “I can do it, but only using …. and …. and ….”

Sure, there are other problems:

Visit the vendor tables at any conference, and 2 inches below the surface there is a sense of unease. Everybody knows how immature this new world is. We are all full of hope. Everybody is trying to figure out who’s going to win which technology battles, and how it’s all going to shake out.

So many options for orchestration, monitoring, developing skillsets, controlling costs, the list goes on and on.

Just about the only thing we really know is that it’s going to happen. Everything else? Yeah. There’s that.

Best of luck, especially if you’re determined to fight this wave. Some interesting times ahead.